


Hurricane's Eye

by FindingZ



Series: PsiiKat for all your fluff/hc needs [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Flashbacks, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Panic Attacks, Poor Psii, Slow Build, more or less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 02:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3592674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FindingZ/pseuds/FindingZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For you are the wild and he is the wind, and sometimes, just sometimes, you can curl up with him and revel in the silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hurricane's Eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [captorvatiing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/captorvatiing/gifts).



                Your dream bubble, with its dim lights and soft corners, gives none of the usual signs of merger - you aren't disturbed until late into the next night, when you wake to elbows brushing yours, to coarse hair tickling your shoulder. Somebody is sharing your 'coon.

                Your first instinct - _she's here she's here she's found you at last_ \- is to seize the intruder with your feebly flickering psionics and hurl them bodily across the room. You calm yourself with no small effort, enough to recognize the horns of the visitor - little mutated nubs, barely visible through short, wiry curls.

                "Kankri?" Which version was it? _Yours_ or, or the younger one, the one who looked at you with doubt in his face and spoke of _his_ Mituna.

                He mutters something, a slurred half-acknowledgement of your speech, and you hesitantly brush some hair from his face. It's not Kankri. The jaw is too square, the forehead is too broad, and the creases between his eyebrows are too prominent. This is somebody else entirely. Kankri's descendant, perhaps? It's obvious to see how much of Kankri's genetic makeup he shares.

                You pull yourself from the sopor as quietly as you can and get dressed. Mystery Vantas sleeps on, so you prepare tea for two and put his to the side. You've had visitors before, maybe once every hundred sweeps, but this is the first time you've had somebody you didn't recognize.

                You sit calmly and drink your tea and wait for him to wake up. It takes several hours. He's an uneasy sleeper, thrashing and occasionally whimpering, sending some of the sopor sloshing over the sides from time to time. What could he be dreaming about, if not of here? You debate waking him, then decide against it. Given your own penchant for uneasy slumber, it would likely be unwise to startle him.

                He rouses himself in due time, however, scrubbing his hands over his face and sighing, resting his forehead against the rim of the recuperacoon. You can see how long his eyelashes are from the distance you're at. You clear your throat. His head snaps up.

                His eyes are a brilliant, jeweled red, like the sun through the viewer on your helm ( _before she took your eyes, told you to focus, focus on your ship/body/self, get home get home)_. You hold your breath and drag your chair a little closer, holding out his mug to him. He blinks, looks from your eyes to your horns to the cup, and stretches out a gooey hand to accept it.

                "You're the Psiioniic." He says after a moment. You feel him looking at you with a militaristic eye, at the way your collarbones jut from your throat, the way your knuckles bulge out, at the errant sparks that slip unbidden from your horns as you look at him. His shoulders slump and his eyes flicker down and to the left.

                "Is something wrong?" _He's ashamed/angry/sad, of course he is. I'm a ghost of who I should be._

                He gives a tiny, mirthless laugh. "You get headaches too, right?"

                "Sometimes." _Too?_

                "I know your descendant."

                Ah.

                "I'm Karkat." He says.

                "Vantas...?"

                "Yeah. You know - ?"

                "I do."

                "Oh." Karkat balances his cup on the rim and hauls himself out of the coon. He's naked, and you note that he's muscular but very, very small - _compact_ , is the correct word. He's covered in scars from his jaw to his ankles - the most prominent one runs from his sternum down to the barely-visible soft of his lower belly. You look away just in time for him to glance around and color.

                "Ah, do you mind if I borrow - ?"

                "Not at all."

                You fetch him a plain gray shirt and a pair of loose pants and turn your back as he gets dressed. He does so quickly and when you turn back around he's standing with his weight on one foot, tense and unsure, clutching the mug like he's trying to ground himself in it.

                "You're alive," you say. He nods slowly. "Pupated already?" _His eyes his eyes he's got the weight of generations on his shoulders does he know?_

                His spine stiffens ( _he knows_ ). "It's a projection." He mutters. "I can't help it."

                You turn your palms up, placating.

                "I'm dead," you tell him. _Not a threat, not to anyone._ "And I know your bloodline, besides. You're safe here. You can relax for the day - you will leave this bubble peacefully at sundown, I promise you. If you wish for us to not converse, I will certainly leave you in peace until you wake."

                Confusion radiates from him. "You're not a _threat_ to me!" Said like he's aghast that you'd spent the energy to consider it. He's so _tense_ all of a sudden. You've never seen such anxiety. He's practically vibrating. What is he...?

                "Can you just - look, okay, I can't be sleeping, I _have_ to wake up, can you, Sollux used to be able to do something, like shock me? I don't fucking know, I never asked, something psionic to keep me awake..."

                He has the same rapid-fire speech pattern as Kankri (of course that would carry over). You have to close your eyes for a second to let the words trickle into your helm-addled brain and soak in the meaning. _Shock him, he wants you to hurt him to wake him? You don't have the control to do that without seriously injuring him, not anymore..._

                You deflect his request. "Where are you sleeping? Is it unsafe?"

                "It's not, no, okay, we are in a delicate situation right now, our whole _session_ is gone and we're relying on, on _aliens_ to get us out of our mess. There's no _time_."

 _Empress puts a hand on your throat, tips your head up, shows you the blank expanse of space through the bridge viewer, "there will be a new universe," she says, "and you are the force that will bring me there. Focus, darling, let me be your eyes_."

                Of course, a session. He's a Player. Of course, of course.

                "Hey, wait, hey, are you...? Mituna?"

                " _Don't call me that_ ," is ripped from your throat before you can clamp it back. Trickles of power drip down your forearms, fizzle into nothing at your fingertips. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. "Call me Psii. Call me - "

                "Psii, okay, I got it. I got it, okay? Psii, are you - " _Soft, quiet voice - he's dealt with the likes of you before._

                "I'm _fine_." You spit. Catch yourself, try again. "I'm fine."

                "Is it the voices?"

_"There is a new universe waiting for the two of us, Mituna. Our descendants made it for us, can you imagine? Built with blood and tears of every color. We are going to meet them and we are going to start fresh."_

                "Voices? There are no voices." Your voice is too hard, too steely. _There never were._

                He steps back. "Sollux heard voices - his psionics made him hear - I assumed that you. Uh. Yeah, okay, forget all that. You want to be alone, I get that, I'll just...wake up?"

                He does.

                An afterimage of him with his eyebrows raised in surprise - "hey, it worked!" is scrawled across his face - holds itself before you for another few seconds, before wiping itself from existence. The mug he was holding falls to the floor and shatters.

                You avoid the mess and climb numbly back into the recuperacoon. The sopor calms the panic rising in you, but you cannot avoid it when energy begins pouring from you in great, heaving waves. When you finally sleep again, you do so fitfully for a full night.

 

                You see him again several times as he flickers in and out of your hive over the next few perigees. Only for a few uncomfortable moments, though, as if he jerks himself awake as soon as he realizes where he is. Oftentimes he'll slip into existence as he did the first time, sleeping in your coon, curled up in the corner, or else draped over a chair at the small table in the corner of the nutritionblock. Those times, he'll slip away again without ever opening his eyes. How truly exhausted must one be to sleep in their dreams? You wonder if he's dreaming of dreaming, and if so, where his dream-dream self imagines itself to be.

                You lose control of your psionics precisely three times in the next twenty eight days. The first time, the ports in your back spasm and shiver with effort but are unable to contain you for long, as riled up as you are. You turn the hive to dust and carve out a crater in the dirt outside so large it takes you six minutes and three seconds to walk from edge to edge. You curl up in the center and dream of the horrorterrors, and when you awaken again the hive is there as it always has been and always will be, and the crater is barely a memory.

                The second time you dream of the Vast Glub and the Empress, who tells you to _run, darling, run for your life_ and you try, you try so hard but you fail and you hear her howling as you turn to ash and, and -

                The hole you burned in the wall takes two nights to heal because it takes that long to calm your mind and remember it as it used to be.

                The third time Karkat is there, trickling into a physical form in your nutritionblock like he's taking his time drifting off, and that's why you panic. You aren't _ready_ ; it took you a full sweep to ease back into yourself the last time you went off like this. You'd been under _control_ before. The metal in your back had stopped singing - you had stopped _dreaming_! And now - !

                And now.

                You flee the hive as he becomes corporeal enough to cast a faint shadow, and just barely make it to the open fields outside before you lose yourself to the burn of unchecked psionics.

                You regain consciousness to the smell of singed grass. The greenery underneath you is singed black, but little else is damaged.

                But he _saw_.

                (he isn't in your hive when you return)

                You close yourself up inside your sopor and force yourself to sleep, even when your stomach whines and your muscles cramp from disuse. You ignore it, sinking down to the bottom of the pod and clasping your hands over your head because he _saw_.

                He saw and you had tried to be different, you had tried because he didn't know you and you could start over, offer him fucking _tea_ and let him share your 'coon because you've had uncountable sweeps to learn to _control_ yourself.

                You fall asleep and dream, wake up, sleep again and do not dream, and then wake again to somebody rapping sharply on the side of your recuperacoon, once, twice, then again. There is a pause, and then a slightly louder noise. Someone speaking?

                A hand reaches down into the sopor and closes around the larger of your right horns.

                You are too disoriented to lash out. Another hand appears and you are dragged from the slime and hauled up and over the side of the 'coon. Your body is heavy and trembling and Karkat is watching you with his upper lip curled. You close your eyes because that's it, isn't it, he's disgusted at you, disgusted _with_ you, like everyone else and you just wanted to have a normal fucking conversation with somebody who didn't know you -

                "When was the last time you ate?"

                "I'm dead." You supply numbly.

                "Don't argue with me, I know how bubbles work as well as you. You're _transparent_. When did you last eat?"

                You just want him to leave. "Doesn't matter."

                Hands pull at you. You swat at him with actual force driving your limbs, yet he is undeterred. "You staying intact means the whole damn bubble is intact and I've taken a look at the neighborhood and this place is by far the most tolerable so will you just eat something?"

                Such astounding diplomatic skills. You ooze down to the floor and look around. Your clothes are plastered to you and squelch uncomfortably when you move. You're cold, all of a sudden. Karkat looms above you.

                "Look, I'll leave soon enough, you've got a migraine, right? But the whole bubble is about to collapse - "

                "'M not the one who controls the bubble," you mutter. "Somebody else is keeping it alive."

                "You're the only one here, Psii."

                "I'm not." _There was a Kankri who came around once every blue moon, a Meulin-who-heard and a Meulin-who-didn't, and there was another you but he spoke too loudly and screamed in his sleep..._

                "There's nobody here." A touch on your arm, fleeting and hesitant but impossible to ignore. "If there was, they left. It's your memory now and nobody else's."

                He pulls you up and there's a can of nutrients on the table in the nutritionblock. He pours you into a chair and your hands tackle the task of opening it, shaking without your permission. You scoop out a glob of whatever it is - what did you eat before the Helm? - and swallow it obediently. It tastes like nothing at all, but the colors of the space around you brighten as the memory equates food with health and stability. Karkat sighs and slumps down in his chair. He's very red.

                "I'm not pale for you, first of all."

                The can vanishes as your focus slips from it. Karkat Vantas scrubs his fingers through his hair and looks everywhere but at you.

                "Self preservation, simple as that," he mutters. "I've seen what happens when a bubble empties and I have no interest in being _inside_ one when it happens."

                "Then wake up. Go somewhere else."

                Karkat hisses a sound of displeasure through his front teeth. "No, no, it's not _like_ that, I need you to understand this, I don't feel - Jesus _fuck_ how do I say this."

                "I get it. Self preservation - I understand. You are welcome to stay in the bubble as long as you like."

                Somehow, it's the wrong thing to say. His claws - ragged, bitten - dig into the wood of your table and he lowers his head for a second, as though to contain his wrath. The can of goop flickers back into existence and you tip it up and guzzle it down without thinking. When you set it down again, Karkat is gone.

 

                The bleeding starts up again soon after, this time from your lowermost port. The one embedded deep into the muscle and bone of your hips, the one that siphoned in nutrients through one tube and removed waste through the other. The one with the ugliest scar tissue surrounding it. You remember taking your first steps here, your first steps after death, and how you had gulped down a cry at the way the movement pulled the metal this way and that, shredding the skin that housed it.

                You imagine a blanket spread out on the floor next to your 'coon and lay on your stomach with your shirt off and a cold damp cloth draped over the raw flesh. Every several hours you have to roll over onto your side and reach for a fresh one. The pile of blood stained fabric grows larger before your eyes.

                You are aware that you cannot die from this, can only fade from existence, but that's a _mental_ process - dying is a purely mental exercise now. You could bleed out a hundred times over and be ultimately unharmed, but the cold water eases the searing agony, and so there you lie.

                You used to count, when this happened in the beginning. Count the seconds until the bleeding stopped, but then there were too many seconds and you had panicked, because you _consciously_ knew that you wouldn't die from an equipment malfunction but your _body_ hadn't known that. You had tried, in a fit of desperation, to wish your ports from existence, but that had only caused more bleeding because you couldn't remember what you had been like without them.

 

                You bleed for nights. By the fifth one your vision goes blurry again and so you wander around the hive with the pain nestled away in the very back of your skull, eating cans of food with your shirt off and blood dripping down your back (much easier cleanup as opposed to wishing new shirts into the space every few hours or so). You call a few books into existence, ones you remember the-Kankri-who-left having stacked high on shelves in his tiny little hive. The subject matter doesn't interest you - politics of a dead society, the biology of a species you were once part of - but the lull of the letters is enough to keep you occupied up until the sixth night, when Karkat reappears.

                "I'm an idiot." Is the first thing out of his mouth, in a tone of voice that suggests that he's been rehearsing for some time now. "I owe you - _holy shit_."

                You have not yet figured how to imagine your clothes directly on to your person, and are thus forced to go scrambling for a shirt, a blanket, anything, as Karkat's eyes bug out and his mouth opens and closes like a gillbeast.

                You can't find your damn shirt. You turn to face him - _too late to hide now, he's seen you, seen everything_ \- and draw yourself up as tall as you can manage (you're much, much taller than him but it doesn't feel like it at all). Karkat's expression softens in a way that makes your stomach clench.

                "Yeah, so I'm a naive horngroper," he says, and steps forward. You take a step back to counter it, but he's determined. You are utterly unprepared for when he rests his forehead on your breastbone, relaxing his whole body against you. "Of course you don't have headaches, what kind of slimesniffer am I?"

                "Er."

_(He's warm, he's warm, he's so warm, he's a star in the center of your chest.)_

                Karkat exhales down over your ribs and stomach. "Can we just forget about my inherent stupidity and start over."

                It isn't a question, but you nod slowly. Realize he can't see you and clear your throat. "Sure."

                "Sit." He tugs at your elbows, pulling you down so you're both kneeling on the floor. You watch the progression of his eyes from your hips to the blood puddled on the floor to your chest to your face. He breathes out sharply. "I'm Karkat and I'm not very fucking observant."

                When you don't immediately respond, he shoves your shoulder (more gently than you thought he would), and you open your mouth.

                "I'm, I'm Psii and I don't usually wander around my hive half naked."

                "Of course you do. I would if I was dead." Karkat is sitting very close to you. You feel like he's expecting you to say something. You close your eyes and let your spine relax, vertebrae by vertebrae, until you're resting your forehead on his shoulder with your back curving over him. You feel him shiver and go very still.

                "So I lied before," he says. His hands ghost up to your ribs, hover there for a moment, and slide up to your shoulders, palms splayed against the muscle. "I'm very, very pale for you."

                "Oh," you say. _He's so young_. "But I'm - "

                "Don't say anything, don't, I _know_ , don't, just let me for a second and I'll go, all right? I promise."

_He's so young, so vulnerable, look at him._

                "Okay."

                He's already interrupting you. "No, _gods_ I didn't mean it like that, I'll only, only if you want, but I don't know, all right, you're not giving me anything to work with, I don't know how to - I wish I had just never come here but I _don't_ , how fucked up is that?"

                "It's not." _He's so young._

                "Of course it is, who even says _just let me_? The scum of society that's who. I'm sorry." He doesn't loosen his grip on you.

                "You're so young."

                "And you're dead. It doesn't matter, really."

                You draw back to tell him of course it does, but as soon as you move he's off you, twisting his body back a good arm's length away, putting his palms out in front of him to say, _look, I've stopped_.

                He looks miserable.

                You haven't felt a romantic emotion since you were alive. You aren't stable enough to be participating in a quadranted relationship, let alone with a _child_. There has to be somebody else. Somebody better for him.

                "I can't."

                "I know." He tucks his chin into his chest, wraps his hands around his elbows. "I know. It's fine."

                (it clearly isn't)

                "I'm dead." You say again.

                "So is everyone _else!_ " He snaps, and the hitch in volume makes you cringe. "Every-fucking-one except for eleven others and they're my _friends_ , they're not anything like you!"

                "Karkat - "

                "I _know_." He moves even farther away from you. "I get it, all right? You don't have to say it."

                " _Karkat_ \- "

                "I'll find another bubble, I've been, I've been looking around and I think I can direct where I go now. And I'm better at waking up when I want to now, and this is probably the last time I'll see you, okay? It's better for the both of us - I don't want you to, to, do you have any idea - I didn't mean to make you _panic_!"

                "You didn't." He's growing more frantic with every heartbeat. What are you supposed to do? He needs someone ( _oh, how he needs someone_ ) to bring him back down but _not you_ because you'd crack him open and damage something vital because it's been _so long_.

                "I _did_." He goes loose and liquid around the edges. He's waking up.

                "You did _not_ , Karkat, please, it's older than that, I'm so old, Karkat, do you really think that my pan is intact after all this?" You tip your head back to indicate the scrapyard of your spine.

                "That's not the point, Psii." He's completely transparent. "That's not the point at all."

 

                You don't see Karkat Vantas again for three sweeps. In that time, you rebuild your hive from the ground up twice, encounter some version of your own descendant, blind and drifting through space (he was snatched up by a Megido you didn't recognize and promptly whisked from the bubble before you could decide to greet him or run back inside), and, incredibly enough, manage to imagine away your topmost port for a whole six hours and twenty one minutes.

                When it happens, somewhere into the second sweep, you call up dozens of mirrors and place them in a circle and put yourself at the center. You force yourself to stare at the smooth expanse of skin on the back of your neck without blinking, trying to memorize it. The missing port was the one that tied your brain to the battleship.

 _"It's what makes you_ you _," she crooned. The nebula was before you, all around you, and yet nothing leapt to the forefront of your processes like the way her hand splayed on your chest, claw tips drawing five precise beads of yellow. "'S why I love you so very much, 'Tuna baby. Do you like the new chip? It's Alpha-caliber, just for you. Should take the edge off the initial Jump - it was a strain before, yeah? I don' wanna see you hurtin,' dearie."_

                When you come to, the port is back, tugging at your flesh when you turn your head about. You crawl into your recuperacoon and sleep away the grief.

                It happens three more times before you see him again. You still have no conscious recollection of yourself before the Empress, and yet, every few perigees, if you wish it hard enough, you become slightly more whole.

                (this never happened before. What changed?)

                (you know what changed)

                This is how he finds you, ultimately, sitting shirtless in the corner of the room facing the wall, hands on your knees, eyes closed. You are thinking about skin, about an unbroken line from your cervical vertebrae all the way down to your sacrum. It's there, you can feel it - you've been concentrating on it for days, and the image is _right there_ \- !

                Somebody coughs.

                Something wells up inside you, something bright and fragile that you haven't had to name in hundreds of sweeps, but you don't open your eyes.

                "Hello," you tell him.

                "...Hello."

                His voice is much quieter than it was ( _subdued_ , _weary_ ). You open your eyes.

                He's taller - almost as tall as you are, now. The bags under his eyes are less pronounced, but there are lines to his face that weren't there before. Scars, too, as well as fading bruises. He's wearing the same clothes you remember him wearing. He's looking directly at you, and his mouth is kept carefully, neutrally, still.

                You don't rise from your seat. "I take it you salvaged your session."

                A startled bark of laughter. "We did. Now we're playing again with the humans. It's taking awhile."

                "Apparently so." Part of you flies off to wonder how he survived three whole sweeps in-Game, _he's not even God Tier, it's easy to tell, his life is fragile/gentle/fleeting and he's still here_ , _still here in his second session, and he's having a dream about you._

                He kneels in front of you with a comfortable grace. He's, he's looking for something. Does he still - ?

                "There was someone else, for awhile. He needed me."

                Ah. "Is he - "

                "No longer with me." Bitter undertones, and oh, there's memories locked up in those four words, things that you could have once dug out of him if you had the time and the interest and the ability. You don't have the ability. "He's, ah, found someone else to occupy his time."

                You take in that information with a nod, and close your eyes again. After a moment, Karkat makes an aggravated noise.

                "You should be angry."

                "Why?"

                "I left."

                "Everybody who comes here leaves," you tell him solemnly. "And I do not mean that as pity-bait. It's a bubble. It's how it is."

                "That's not how I meant it and you know it."

                "Do I?"

                "Rrgh, just, just open your eyes."

                You comply. He's moved close enough to touch your knees to his, and he looks quite serious.

                "My being here made you unstable. Fact."

                "No, fiction."

                "No, _fact_. You never would have panicked that first time if I hadn't brought up _her_. Fact."

                "Speculation."

                " _No,_ gods, just shut up for a second. I'm trying to apologize!"

                "There is no need."

                His eyes squint in irritation. "Do you have any _idea_ how long it's taken me to figure out what to say after I found out I was back in the region of your bubble again? Either accept what I'm trying to say or not, but don't just _ignore_ me - "

                You stand up and step neatly over him, pulling your discarded shirt over your head. "If it will ease your conscious, your apology is accepted, but it still remains unwarranted."

                "I haven't even apologized yet!"

                He really is stuck on this, isn't he? You suppose if it will make him feel better, you'll let him trip over himself with unnecessary speeches. You make your way into the nutritionblock and sweep your hand out to the side, gesturing for him to continue.

                You hear him padding across the floor behind you, trailing at a close distance. "I'm sorry for spewing diamonds everywhere like a trashy porno and being even more embarrassing than I usually am."

                You suddenly can't remember why you went into the nutritionblock. "...What?"

                (whatever you were thinking he would apologize for, that wasn't it)

                When you slowly turn around, he's glaring at you. "Don't pretend it never happened. I was regurgitating diamonds from every conceivable orifice and acting like a fool."

_Was._

                Something goes tight in you, a muscle cramp in a previously void space. Before you can decide how on Alternia you are going to answer him, he pulls his eyes away from you and tugs at his clothing with restless fingers.

                "I just wanted to say." All the fire has gone from him. "It obviously upset you, so I wanted to apologize. And, yeah." His eyes dart around the room. "That's basically the first apology I've given out in awhile, in case you were wondering. I don't hand those out like material at a drone party, so don't - "

                "I accept your apology," you say hastily, hoping you sound reassuring.

                Again, his expression says you've said the wrong thing. What does he _want_ from you? He just apologized for feelings he no longer has for you and is hurt that you accepted him readily -

                Oh.

_Oh._

                "You still have feelings for me."

                Karkat makes a funny noise, like a stifled hiccup, and stares you down despite the blood rushing to his face.

                "Well, yeah, but I'm hardly going to come crawling back to you, am I? Not after Gamzee, like you're some rebound fling - and, and I'm obviously having a decidedly _un_ soothing effect on you, jesus, I still can't believe I made you panic, so yeah, okay, congrats, you figured it out, I never really got over you. Which is _stupid_ because I've only seen you half a dozen times and spoken to you less and it's not even _requited_ and here I am babbling like a drunken - "

 _Oh_.

                "It's not _not_ requited," you blurt. "I mean - "

                What _do_ you mean?

                Karkat has stopped breathing. "What?"

                "I'm, Karkat I've never...I've not been pale for someone since I was alive."

                "Doesn't matter." Hopeful, hopeful, now you've made him hopeful. You have to do this right.

                "But it _does_." You insist. "It does. I can barely remember if I was _ever_ alive, Karkat, do you truly think that I can recall how to go about a morailallegiance?"

                "You're doing a good job so far." He's smiling, just a little, giving you the barest hint of teeth.

_No._

                You freeze. Your pusher takes off.

                No, no, no, why did he have to say -

                You flare up red and blue before you can stop yourself. She'd said that to you, said _nonsense, Mituna, you'll be the most powerful Helmsman the universe has ever known by the time I'm done with you. I won't hear another word about it._ Said when you'd first been installed and had tried to tell her you didn't have the control, you weren't what she was looking for, _please Meenah don't do this._

 _Nonsense,_ she'd said. _You're doing a good job so far, why wouldn't I want you? You're perfect, darling._

                No, no, you were doing so well, you were doing so _well -_

                Karkat is touching you, guiding you with gentle hands back into the main room, imagining a pile into existence as he goes. He pushes you down onto it and sits cross-legged off to the side, resting his hand on your arm, as light as air.

                "Breathe."

                You breathe, trying not to gulp down air as loudly as you are. You squeeze your eyes shut.

                "Gods, Psii..." Karkat's fingers clamp down on your arm. "You haven't changed at all, have you?"

                You make a small noise before you can stop yourself, a verbal question mark.

                He snatches his hand away. "I'm not going to if, if you don't want. Don't worry, I won't, _gods_ don't think that I'd force you, please."

                Force you? "No, no, you wouldn't..." You flex your bicep, just to feel the echo of where his grip was. "You're truly...?"

                "Gamzee wasn't - he wasn't like you, nowhere even close, but he _needed_ me and nobody else was willing. He knew it, too, which was probably why..." He trails off. "There's nobody else for me. Never was. Just you."

                There's no mistaking the certainty in his voice. You shiver (hear his breath hitch). _For me, for me, he's pale for_ me.

                "I'm not," you begin, and stop. "I don't - I don't know _how_ , but I think." You have to pause for a moment to examine your knees. In, out, in, out.

                "Mmm?" He resumes petting your arm. You try not to lose yourself in it.

                "Ah, I think. That I could be." You could be, you absolutely could be. You can't remember how you're supposed to feel, how you're supposed to act when he tells you _there's nobody else for me_ but you feel warm and quiet inside and you think that maybe that's enough.

                His breath escapes him in a steady rush. A hand cups your chin and pulls your head around to face him. His eyes are very large.

                "You hardly know me, though."

                (his voice is barely audible)

                You're confused. "I know? But you...for me..."

                "No, no, I'm not saying, no, I'm not saying that. You're just...I don't want to coerce you into this."

                "My will is my own," you say, affronted. "I'm capable of making my own decisions."

                He looks like he doesn't believe you - like he doesn't _want_ to believe you. Like he's hoping you're lying? Like he _wants_ you to say you feel like you're being pressured?

 _Oh_.

                He's assuming the worst because he's trying not to get hurt, so he's telling himself -  

 _Oh_.

                You are fairly positive that the emotion making your head swim is of the palest color known. This might...might not be so difficult after all.

                "Stay awhile?" You ask. He meets your gaze for a long moment, and does.

 

                Karkat visits you every morning, always staying for precisely six hours and thirty minutes before flickering back to consciousness. Each day he improves by leaps and bounds, his skin darkening and the shadows under his eyes lightening. You find yourself preening, just a little, when you first notice it - _because of_ me _he's healthy, he's healing because he wants to come see_ me _-_ but try not to let it show because you are many things but a narcissist is not one of them.

                (he notices, though, and swats you on the shoulder, telling you to wipe that smug look off your face. He smiles wide, though)

                It's...strange. Some days you imagine the whole room as one giant pile and lay there, just the two of you, in complete silence. Some days you talk for hours, about little things (he tells you about the aliens, painting such vivid pictures of them that you feel you know them personally), big things (you tell him about your session and he tells you about his), and frightening things (you tell him, in bits and panicky pieces, about the Empress and the Helm and let him trace his fingers up your back and ask which port did what. He tells you about his session, about his mutation and the terror of one day dying alone).

                Your psionics settle down when he's with you. You are less prone to blackouts and seizures, and when you tell him this, sleepy from the warmth his body generates, he tries his very best to hide his smile. You see it anyway.

                (you tell him about how you made a port disappear, how you'd spent eternity trying to wish them away, how you now can finally manage it if you're calm enough. Maybe, you whisper, you could show him sometime, maybe you could make it last a whole night for him. He flushes right down to his toes at your words)

                Still, though, your hardware acts up from time to time. A perigee in, the muscles in your back start spasming so violently that it is all you can do to lie still and not shake your teeth from your head. He finds you lying there face down, gouging holes in the floor with your claws and bleeding from your lips where you've bitten them.

                He's in over his head, hands shaking when he rolls you over, but he tries to help anyway, even though there's nothing he can do. You curl into a ball and wait for it to be over while he runs his fingers through your hair and over the rough surface of your horns. Neither of you say anything, and when your body finally stills hours later, he's struggling to stay asleep. Another half hour passes, and he slips from your fingers with an apology scrawled across his face.

                Later, he comes back with a hard, closed look on his face, fighting back tears. You tamp down what little control you have over your psionics - don't want to shock him, don't want to hurt him - and open your arms. He nestles into your chest, and you ask him what happened. He taps his forehead on your collarbone to the beat of your heart and mutters something about his friends, something about death and Time and demons. You bury your face in his hair.

                He'll tell you when he wants to. When he's ready. For now, you half-carry-half-drag him to your 'coon and get in with him. You sink down to the bottom, letting the gel fill your lungs, and you feel, rather than hear, the soft note he exhales.

                You lose track of the time until he pulls away and surfaces. He coughs once, twice, and scowls at you.

                "You _know_ I'm shit at reimagining clothing." His eyes are dry, though, and something soft wraps around your ribcage ( _you did that,_ you _did that, he's calm, he's going to be okay_ ).

                "I wasn't sure," you tell him softly, "if I was allowed. So I didn't."

                His face smoothes over instantly and he touches a hand to your cheek. "Of course you are. Always." A beat, and he raises his arms over his head. "Now get these off of me."

                Your hands are steady as you undress him, throwing piece after piece of sopor-logged clothing over the side. His eyes never leave your face, but you focus on the progress of your fingers.

                ( _it's working it's working, you're witnessing the start of something beautiful, something you never thought you'd get to have again)_

                When he's completely naked, he tugs at the hem of your shirt.

                "Your turn?"

                You say yes. The air of the block is warm against your skin.

                (his smile is warmer)

**Author's Note:**

> Hmm, should I do a part 2? I think I really wanna do a part 2...


End file.
